I'm having a look at it right now. Will report back soon.

Edit: It needs gio and would need some other libraries, although the other libraries can be replaced by what is in the SDK, afaict.

About the hildon version: It's mostly the stuff that one has to do to port apps to hildon (reparent the main menu, etc..). It also uses the users's home folder (MyDocs, etc..) as a save location. Apart from that, it's stock Cheese 2.24.

Maybe porting an older version of cheese (pre-GIO, i.e. gnomevfs, etc..) that uses more Diablo-like versions of the needed libraries will work? Porting the hildon-specific changes back to an older version should not be too hard.